No lights on 'Sunday'

"When looking for bias, one invariably finds it", says one of the BBC's defenders at the Guardian website (in the thread beneath the report mentioned in the last post).

It's a theme I used to dwell on quite a bit here, and it's one that those who blog about BBC bias should always have at the back of their minds, acting like a smoke detector. 

As someone who tunes into Radio 4's Sunday with the express purpose of monitoring it for bias, I am certainly "looking for bias". Almost "invariably" I "find it" too.

For example, as many of Britain's Hindus and Sikhs are celebrating Diwali today, you might have expected Radio 4's main religious current affairs programme to feature something to reflect that - as, for example, they often do whenever it's a major Muslim festival. 

However, if you may recall, Sunday has a proven track record of ignoring Hindu and Sikh concerns - as per my earlier survey of this very issue which resulted in the following stats:

2 items in 21 months for Hinduism.

1 item in 21 months for Sikhism. 

44 items in 21 months for Islam. 

Therefore, I didn't expect that Sunday would pay any attention to Diwali today, just as it ignored the festival in 2012 and in 2011 as well. 

I was "looking for bias" today over this issue and, as there was no such feature today, "found it." 

As Hindus and Sikhs together comprise around 2.3% of the UK population, as compared to 5% for Islam, you might have expected - from the pro-multiculturalism BBC especially - a better balance of coverage. 

Why does Sunday largely ignore Hindus and Sikhs, whilst paying so much attention to Muslims? Is it because the BBC has a pro-Muslim bias? Or because Muslims complain a lot more than Hindus and Sikhs? Or because Muslims are always getting themselves into the news these days, for one reason or another, and Sunday, being a religious current affairs programme, is bound to reflect that fact?

Even if the last point is the main reason, that still doesn't fully explain the sheer scale of the discrepancy between the coverage of the three religions on Sunday.   

So much for multi-culturalism then!

A few years ago the Independent reported that Hindu and Sikh groups were concerned about pro-Muslim bias at the BBC:

Hindu and Sikh leaders have accused the BBC of pandering to Britain's Muslim community by making a disproportionate number of programmes on Islam at the expense of covering other Asian religions. 

A breakdown of programming from the BBC's Religion and Ethics department, seen by The Independent, reveals that since 2001, the BBC made 41 faith programmes on Islam, compared with just five on Hinduism and one on Sikhism.

Critics say the disproportionate amount of programming is part of an apparent bias within the BBC towards Islam since the attacks of 11 September 2001, which has placed an often uncomfortable media spotlight on Britain's Muslims.

Ashish Joshi, the chairman of the Network of Sikh Organisation's (NSO) media monitoring group, which obtained the numbers, said many Hindu and Sikh licence-fee payers felt cheated. "People in our communities are shocked," he said. "We are licence-fee payers and we want to know why this has happened. The bias towards Islam at the expense of Hindus and particularly Sikhs is overwhelming and appears to be a part of BBC policy."

It sounds like they have a case, doesn't it?  It probably won't surprise many of you though that the BBC was having none of it, rejecting the criticism out of hand:

In a letter sent in July to the NSO, the head of the BBC's Religion and Ethics, Michael Wakelin, denied that there was any bias. He said the demographic makeup of Britain meant that Britain's 1.6 million Muslims outnumber Hindus and Sikhs by two to one. "Therefore," he wrote, "if Muslims get 60 minutes a year, the Sikhs and Hindus should share 30 minutes each." Further content on Islam, he added, was "no doubt sparked by the interest in the faith following 9/11". 

A spokesman for the BBC said the broadcaster was committed to representing all of Britain's faiths and communities. "We reject any claims of bias," he said. "In our religion and ethics content alone, we have covered Hindu and Sikh issues this year on The Big Questions, Sunday Life and Extreme Pilgrim. In the autumn we will be covering Diwali from a Sikh perspective and we have a major new series for BBC Two in early 2009, including features on Hinduism and Sikhism."

OK, so who's right, the Sikh and Hindu leaders or the bigwigs and spokespersonages at the BBC? 

If there were ever a case for using Sunday, BBC Radio 4's flagship religious and ethical current affairs programme, as a test-case, this is surely it.

Have Hindus and Sikhs been under-represented, as they claim, or was Mr Wakelin, then head of the BBC's Religion and Ethics Department (since replaced by Aaqil Ahmed, a Muslim), actually correct in saying that they get proportionate coverage? We can certainly test his bold - and very specific - claim to impartiality, that "if Muslims get 60 minutes a year, the Sikhs and Hindus should share 30 minutes each." Is that what really happens?

How are we to count items featuring Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs on Sunday? Do we count all those many, many, many Sunday items on political events (revolutions, civil wars, elections, etc) in Muslim-majority countries, mostly reflecting some aspect or other of the so-called 'Arab Spring'? Clearly that should be a 'no', unless the feature in question is specifically focused on examining Islamic aspects to the story. Obviously, however, disentangling these two strands is far from easy in many stories from that part of the world, where religion and politics are often very closely entwined. Still, I will reject most of these items from the list, despite there being dozens of them. 

Getting an absolutely precise, unambiguous, incontrovertible total for all Islam-centred features is, therefore, going to be much harder than getting one for Hinduism and Sikhism. On top of which there's the question of whether we should include guests who are Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, even when they aren't talking about religion or religiously-derived ethical matters?  I'll say 'no' to that one too. (So that's a good number more chucked out!). Again, it's very difficult to mark hard-and-fast rules for what to count and what not to count, so I'll let you chuck out any of the remainder which you feel shouldn't be there and I'll place in brackets any others I doubt should be there. 

Still, absolutely precise figures may not even be necessary - as you'll see! Better, perhaps, just to let your eyes scroll their way down the following lists.

Right, here goes!

"Hello Jim. Hello John"

For the millions of ardent fans of Thought For The Day, Today's daily offering of short religiously-inspired talks - though the word 'inspired' doesn't always spring to my mind while listening to many of them -, here's a list I prepared earlier which may be of interest. 

If you're bursting to to know whether Giles Fraser has been on more than Angela Tilby, here's your chance to find out. 

Does the BBC monitor such things? If it does it has never revealed its figures for TFTD for public consumption - as far as I'm aware.

The BBC website used to have a dedicated archive for past editions of TFTD since February 2001 which listed every appearance by individual speakers. They stopped updating the archive in April last year and removed the page altogether earlier this year. That means that tracking who’s speaking on TFTD either becomes a slog from each page of the Today programme’s archive (with its occasional gaps) or, much easier, a run through the (ever-amusing) archive at ‘Platitude of the Day’.

I did a tally a year or so ago, after someone on another blog wondered whether a FOI request could be put in to get the BBC to give figures for TFTD speakers. (He had his reasons for that. He thought they were inviting too many Muslims on.). Updating it to include all recent editions of TFTD thus provides a complete record from February 2001 to 3 August 2012.

The following list shows the number of talks given by TFTD speakers over the last eleven and a half years, in descending order (with their religious affiliation, for added spice):

Tom Butler 166 Christianity

Anne Atkins 150 Christianity

Jonathan Sacks 146 Judaism

Richard Harries 143 Christianity

Roy Jenkins 136 Christianity

Rob Marshall 130 Christianity

Angela Tilby 129 Christianity

Indarjit Singh 128 Sikhism

Alan Billings 126 Christianity

Giles Fraser 122 Christianity

Mona Siddiqui 121 Islam

Rhidian Brook 120 Christianity

Clifford Longley 118 Christianity

James Jones 112 Christianity

David Winter 107 Christianity

John Bell 107 Christianity

Lionel Blue 104 Judaism

Akhandadhi Das 99 Hinduism

Catherine Pepinster 83 Christianity

Joel Edwards 83 Christianity

Colin Morris 80 Christianity

Elaine Storkey 78 Christianity

Brian Draper 77 Christianity

Abdal Hakim Murad 67 Islam

Rosemary Lain-Priestley 51 Christianity

Vishvapani 51 Buddhism

Dom Antony Sutch 47 Christianity

Oliver McTernan 46 Christianity

David Wilkinson 40 Christianity

Lucy Winkett 40 Christianity

Jim Thompson 34 Christianity

Martin Palmer 31 Christianity

Lesley Griffiths 30 Christianity

Jeevan Singh Deol 29 Sikhism

Michael Banner 27 Christianity

Johnston McMaster 25 Christianity

Huw Spanner 21 Christianity

Christina Rees 19 Christianity

Harvey Thomas 19 Christianity

Lavinia Byrne 19 Christianity

Graham Jones 17 Christianity

Cristina Odone 14 Christianity

Satish Kumar 14 Jainism

Russell Stannard 12 Christianity

Gabrielle Cox 11 Christianity

Laura Janner-Klausner 9 Judaism

Rowan Williams 9 Christianity

Eric James 8 Christianity

Jonathan Bartley 8 Christianity

Cormac Murphy-O’Connor 7 Christianity

Shagufta Yaqub 7 Islam

Gavin Oldham 5 Christianity

Jonathan Gledhill 5 Christianity

Vincent Nichols 5 Christianity

Annabel Shilson-Thomas 3 Christianity

Antonia Swinson 3 Christianity

Jo Ind 3 Christianity

Madeleine Bunting 3 Christianity

Mark Christian 3 Christianity

Hamza Yusuf 2 Islam

Penny Faust 2 Judaism

Raj Sharma 2 Hinduism

Alan Woodrow 1 Christianity

Anna Magnusson 1 Christianity

Benedict XVI 1 Christianity

Bishop Angaelos 1 Christianity

Brian Protheroe 1 Christianity

Courtney Cowart 1 Christianity

David Hope 1 Christianity

David Wilkes 1 Christianity

David Wells 1 Christianity

Duncan Green 1 Christianity

Farhan Nizami 1 Islam

George Carey 1 Christianity

Gilleasbuig Macmillan 1 Christianity

Ian Sherwood 1 Christianity

Jerome Murphy O’Connor 1 Christianity

Jimmy Morrison 1 Christianity

John Barton 1 Christianity

John Sentamu 1 Christianity

Julia Neuberger 1 Judaism

Keith Patrick O’Brien 1 Christianity

Kevin Franz 1 Christianity

Khaled Fahmy 1 Islam

Maurice Michaels 1 Judaism

Mary Steel 1 Christianity

Michael Sanders 1 Christianity

Michael Symmons Roberts 1 Christianity

Nicholas Papadopulos 1 Christianity

Richard Thomas 1 Christianity

Robin Eames 1 Christianity

Yunus Dudhwala 1 Islam

There have been 92 individual speakers on TFTP. The number of speakers representing each religion breaks down as follows:

Christianity 73

Islam 7

Judaism 6

Hinduism 2

Sikhism 2

Buddhism 1

Jainism 1

There have been 3443 TFTDs over that period.

This is the total number of talks given by representatives of each religion (and their percentage of the total):

Christianity 2657 (77.17%)

Judaism 263 (7.64%)

Islam 200 (5.81%)

Sikhism 157 (4.56%)

Hinduism 101 (2.93%)

Buddhism 51 (1.48%)

Jainism 14 (0.41%)

The above figures, of course, say nothing about the standpoint of the speakers. Regular listeners of TFTD will be able to draw their own conclusions from the list of presenters above.

As regards the question 'Is the BBC biased?' I'll leave you to form your own opinions.